Jon Weinberg is a student at Harvard Law School.
The legal fight over North Carolina’s “bathroom bill” continues – and it turns on whether Title VII prohibits sexual orientation or transgender (gender identity) discrimination in the workplace. CNN reports that “the United States and North Carolina tangled over transgender rights on Monday, with the Justice Department filing a civil rights lawsuit over the state’s so-called bathroom bill and state officials defiantly filing suits against the federal directive to stop the implementation of the controversial legislation.” The Justice Department and North Carolina offer different interpretations of Title VII. The Justice Department argues that “access to sex-segregated restrooms and other workplace facilities consistent with gender identity is a term, condition or privilege of employment. Denying such access to transgender individuals, whose gender identity is different from their gender assigned at birth, while affording it to similarly situated non-transgender employees, violates Title VII.” North Carolina says that the DOJ position represents a “radical reinterpretation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.”
New research shows that factory jobs in the United States aren’t the path to the middle class that they once were. According to The Washington Post, a new report from Ken Jacobs, Zohar Perla, Ian Perry and Dave Graham-Squire of University of California-Berkeley shows “that one-third of the families of “frontline manufacturing production workers” are enrolled in a government safety-net program. The families’ benefits cost state and local governments about $10 billion a year on average from 2009 to 2013, the analysis found.”
The prospects for truckers are similarly bleak. The Atlantic analyzed trucking and “how one of America’s steadiest jobs turned into one of its most grueling.”
Finally, writing for Bloomberg, Rebecca Greenfield looks at experimentation with the six-hour workday in Europe and asks whether it could work in America.
Daily News & Commentary
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September 16
In today’s news and commentary, the NLRB sues New York, a flight attendant sues United, and the Third Circuit considers the employment status of Uber drivers The NLRB sued New York to block a new law that would grant the state authority over private-sector labor disputes. As reported on recently by Finlay, the law, which […]
September 15
Unemployment claims rise; a federal court hands victory to government employees union; and employers fire workers over social media posts.
September 14
Workers at Boeing reject the company’s third contract proposal; NLRB Acting General Counsel William Cohen plans to sue New York over the state’s trigger bill; Air Canada flight attendants reject a tentative contract.
September 12
Zohran Mamdani calls on FIFA to end dynamic pricing for the World Cup; the San Francisco Office of Labor Standards Enforcement opens a probe into Scale AI’s labor practices; and union members organize immigration defense trainings.
September 11
California rideshare deal advances; Boeing reaches tentative agreement with union; FTC scrutinizes healthcare noncompetes.
September 10
A federal judge denies a motion by the Trump Administration to dismiss a lawsuit led by the American Federation of Government Employees against President Trump for his mass layoffs of federal workers; the Supreme Court grants a stay on a federal district court order that originally barred ICE agents from questioning and detaining individuals based on their presence at a particular location, the type of work they do, their race or ethnicity, and their accent while speaking English or Spanish; and a hospital seeks to limit OSHA's ability to cite employers for failing to halt workplace violence without a specific regulation in place.